Picademy is the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s free face-to-face professional development programme that supports educators throughout their digital making and computing journey. This two-day training event is held at venues around the UK and North America. After completing the programme, educators join a community of passionate digital making practitioners.Interested in attending? Visit our event calendar to find a Picademy near you.

Day 2 was an opportunity to break into groups and have extended time to develop a project prototype. I partnered with Cathy Knives Chau and Lauren Berrios, and we created PiPix, a portable RaspberryPi powered Polaroid-inspired camera that can be picked up by students at any time to take pictures of class projects or on class trips. Different filters can be applied, and photos would be uploaded to a class Twitter stream. We successfully designed a countdown timer to display on the SenseHat, enabled the SenseHat’s joystick to take the picture, and had a random filter applied to the captured image. We needed more time to have the joystick be used to choose a filter and/or allow the user to choose to capture an image or an animated GIF. We were on the verge of integrating our program with Twitter’s API (Thanks to Cathy!), but didn’t manage this in time. Cathy, Lauren, and I are hoping to gather later in the summer to complete a successful PiPix prototype!

Here’s our code so far…

# PiPix

# Using SenseHat for Geo location, four buttons for filters, countdown

I shared this link with Kasie Stark, one of the fabulous Science teachers at The Brearley School. Kasie is leading a MakerLab session during Brearley’s Summer Start program, and she suggested trying out Paperbits with her campers this week. On Monday, Kasie and I met to chat about micro:bits and MakeCode (micro:bit’s JavaScript Blocks editor). We gathered copper tape, LED lights, alligator clips, and Piezo buzzers, and a few copies of Per-Ivar’s Paperbits lessons.

Today, I met Kasie and her campers and we explored together. The girls are both going into 4th grader and have had experiences with littleBits, LEGO WeDo, Scratch,JavaScript, and more. I love working with smart, fearless girls! We treated Per-Ivar’s Paperbits PDF’s as a fun starting point, and then the girls further prototyped with different sequences of blinking lights and different tunes from the buzzers. See images and videos below.

I imagine Scribble may include more features eventually, like maybe a “fill” option? Without a quick way to fill an outline of a shape, I manually used the Brush Tool (as if I were drawing with crayons on paper), and then use the Eraser Tool to make the holes in my first design below. For my second attempt, I used the Shape Tool and Shape Eraser Tool. It was a little weird at first, but then I started to get the hang of it. I’d really like the option of sketching an outline and filling it in. Yes, I’m repeating myself.